ASU Scholarship Showcase

This article develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets. We extend Rosen's hedonic model to explain how housing prices capitalize exogenous shocks to public goods and externalities. The model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these “capitalization effects” and welfare changes. We test this hypothesis in the context of changes in measures of school quality in five metropolitan areas. Results from boundary discontinuity designs suggest that capitalization effects understate parents’ willingness to pay for public school improvements by as much as 75%.

Background: The shift from solitary to social behavior is one of the major evolutionary transitions. Primitively eusocial bumblebees are uniquely placed to illuminate the evolution of highly eusocial insect societies. Bumblebees are also invaluable natural and agricultural pollinators, and there is widespread concern over recent population declines in some species. High-quality genomic data will inform key aspects of bumblebee biology, including susceptibility to implicated population viability threats.

Results: We report the high quality draft genome sequences of Bombus terrestris and Bombus impatiens, two ecologically dominant bumblebees and widely utilized study species. Comparing these new genomes to those of the highly eusocial honeybee Apis mellifera and other Hymenoptera, we identify deeply conserved similarities, as well as novelties key to the biology of these organisms. Some honeybee genome features thought to underpin advanced eusociality are also present in bumblebees, indicating an earlier evolution in the bee lineage. Xenobiotic detoxification and immune genes are similarly depauperate in bumblebees and honeybees, and multiple categories of genes linked to social organization, including development and behavior, show high conservation. Key differences identified include a bias in bumblebee chemoreception towards gustation from olfaction, and striking differences in microRNAs, potentially responsible for gene regulation underlying social and other traits.

Conclusions: These two bumblebee genomes provide a foundation for post-genomic research on these key pollinators and insect societies. Overall, gene repertoires suggest that the route to advanced eusociality in bees was mediated by many small changes in many genes and processes, and not by notable expansion or depauperation.

We present a phylogeographic study of at least six reproductively isolated lineages of new world harvester ants within the Pogonomyrmex barbatus and P. rugosus species group. The genetic and geographic relationships within this clade are complex: Four of the identified lineages show genetic caste determination (GCD) and are divided into two pairs. Each pair has evolved under a mutualistic system that necessitates sympatry. These paired lineages are dependent upon one another because their GCD requires interlineage matings for the production of F1 hybrid workers, and intralineage matings are required to produce queens. This GCD system maintains genetic isolation among these interdependent lineages, while simultaneously requiring co-expansion and emigration as their distributions have changed over time. It has also been demonstrated that three of these four GCD lineages have undergone historical hybridization, but the narrower sampling range of previous studies has left questions on the hybrid parentage, breadth, and age of these groups. Thus, reconstructing the phylogenetic and geographic history of this group allows us to evaluate past insights and hypotheses and to plan future inquiries in a more complete historical biogeographic context. Using mitochondrial DNA sequences sampled across most of the morphospecies’ ranges in the U.S.A. and Mexico, we conducted a detailed phylogeographic study. Remarkably, our results indicate that one of the GCD lineage pairs has experienced a dramatic range expansion, despite the genetic load and fitness costs of the GCD system. Our analyses also reveal a complex pattern of vicariance and dispersal in Pogonomyrmex harvester ants that is largely concordant with models of late Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene range shifts among various arid-adapted taxa in North America.

Increasing levels of financial inequality prompt questions about the relationship between income and well-being. Using a twins sample from the Survey of Midlife Development in the U. S. and controlling for personality as core self-evaluations (CSE), we found that men, but not women, had higher subjective financial well-being (SFWB) when they had higher incomes. This relationship was due to ‘unshared environmental’ factors rather than genes, suggesting that the effect of income on SFWB is driven by unique experiences among men. Further, for women and men, we found that CSE influenced income and SFWB, and that both genetic and environmental factors explained this relationship. Given the relatively small and male-specific relationship between income and SFWB, and the determination of both income and SFWB by personality, we propose that policy makers focus on malleable factors beyond merely income in order to increase SFWB, including financial education and building self-regulatory capacity.

The debate about representation in the brain and the nature of the cognitive system has been going on for decades now. This paper examines the neurophysiological evidence, primarily from single cell recordings, to get a better perspective on both the issues. After an initial review of some basic concepts, the paper reviews the data from single cell recordings – in cortical columns and of category-selective and multisensory neurons. In neuroscience, columns in the neocortex (cortical columns) are understood to be a basic functional/computational unit. The paper reviews the fundamental discoveries about the columnar organization and finds that it reveals a massively parallel search mechanism. This columnar organization could be the most extensive neurophysiological evidence for the widespread use of localist representation in the brain. The paper also reviews studies of category-selective cells. The evidence for category-selective cells reveals that localist representation is also used to encode complex abstract concepts at the highest levels of processing in the brain. A third major issue is the nature of the cognitive system in the brain and whether there is a form that is purely abstract and encoded by single cells. To provide evidence for a single-cell based purely abstract cognitive system, the paper reviews some of the findings related to multisensory cells. It appears that there is widespread usage of multisensory cells in the brain in the same areas where sensory processing takes place. Plus there is evidence for abstract modality invariant cells at higher levels of cortical processing. Overall, that reveals the existence of a purely abstract cognitive system in the brain. The paper also argues that since there is no evidence for dense distributed representation and since sparse representation is actually used to encode memories, there is actually no evidence for distributed representation in the brain. Overall, it appears that, at an abstract level, the brain is a massively parallel, distributed computing system that is symbolic. The paper also explains how grounded cognition and other theories of the brain are fully compatible with localist representation and a purely abstract cognitive system.

This paper studies an infinite-horizon repeated moral hazard problem where a single principal employs several agents. We assume that the principal cannot observe the agents' effort choices; however, agents can observe each other and can be contractually required to make observation reports to the principal. Observation reports, if truthful, can serve as a monitoring instrument to discipline the agents. However, reports are cheap talk so that it is also possible for agents to collude, i.e., where they shirk, earn rents, and report otherwise to the principal. The main result of the paper constructs a class of collusion-proof contracts with two properties. First, equilibrium payoffs to both the principal and the agents approach their first-best benchmarks as the discount factor tends to unity. These payoff bounds apply to all subgame perfect equilibria in the game induced by the contract. Second, while equilibria themselves depend on the discount factor, the contract that induces these equilibria is independent of the discount factor.

This paper traces the history of mortgage law in the United States. I explore the history of foreclosure procedures, redemption periods, restrictions on deficiency judgments, and foreclosure moratoria. The historical record shows that the most enduring aspects of mortgage law stem from case law rather than statute. In particular, the ability of creditors to foreclose nonjudicially is determined very early in states’ histories, usually before the Civil War, and usually in case law. In contrast, the aspects of mortgage law developed through statute change more frequently. This finding calls into question whether common law is inherently more flexible than the civil-law system used in some other countries. However, case law tends to be less responsive to populist pressures than statutes. My findings suggest that the reason common law favors financial development is unlikely to be its greater flexibility relative to law made by statute.

Persistent economic pressures in today's business landscape require organizations to be constantly vigilant about managing costs. Reducing headcount is one common but often controversial form of cost cutting. Recently Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be cutting an additional 11,000-16,000 jobs on top of an original plan to let as many as 34,000 workers go as part of a business restructuring and turnaround strategy. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Meg Whitman said major shifts that are transforming how technology is paid for and consumed pose major challenges for HP, along with its competitors. To be successful in this new reality, she emphasized that HP needs to be lower-cost and more nimble. This is just one of a long list of examples of significant corporate workforce reductions in the face of mounting financial and competitive challenges faced by businesses across many industries.

As our discipline has matured, we have begun to develop theories of supply chain management. However, we submit that a major omission of theory development in the supply chain management discipline is that we have failed to develop a theory of what we are managing - a theory of the supply chain. Using a conceptual theory building approach, we introduce foundational premises about the structure and boundary of the supply chain, which can serve as the basis for much needed, additional development of the theory of the supply chain.

Information systems research is replete with examples of the importance of business processes defining IT adoption. Business processes are influenced by both organizational and operational concerns. We evaluate the comparative importance of operational and organizational influences for complementary IT systems. In the context of acute-care hospitals the analysis shows that an organizational approach to automating a process is related to different financial outcomes than an operational approach. Six complementary systems supporting a three-stage medication management process are studied: prescribing, dispensing, and administration. The analysis uses firm-level, panel data extracted from the HIMSS Analytics database spanning ten years of IT adoption for 140 hospitals. We have augmented the HIMSS dataset with matching demographic and financial details from the American Hospital Association and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Using event sequence analysis we explore whether organizations are more likely to adopt organization boundary spanning systems and if the sequence of adoption follows the temporal ordering of the business process steps. The research also investigates if there is a relationship between the paths to IT adoption and financial performance. Comparison of the two measures suggests that the organizational model of adoption is observed more often in the data. Following the organizational model of adoption is associated with approximately $155 dollar increase in net income per patient day; whereas the operational model of adoption is associated with approximately $225 dollars decrease in net income per patient day. However, this effect diminishes with the adoption of each additional system thus demonstrating that the adoption path effects may only be relevant in the short-term.